Tag: San Bernardino

Investigators seek help identifying woman found dead on mountainside in San Bernardino

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Investigators in San Bernardino County are seeking the public’s help in identifying a woman who was found dead on the side of a mountain in Crestline.

Deputies from the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Station responded to a call about a body near the intersection of Highway 138 and Crestline Road on Nov. 18 around 11:42 a.m., according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. They located the woman about 75 feet down a steep embankment.

The stretch of highway is also referred to as the “Rim of the World Scenic Byway” because of its panoramic views along mountain edges.

Officials described the woman as 48 to 60 years old, 5-foot-1 tall and weighing 115 pounds. She was wearing a blue sweatshirt, blue pants and white-and-black New Balance shoes. She has bleached blond hair, brown eyes and no tattoos.

The woman was transported to the county Coroner’s Office where an autopsy found injuries consistent with a fall, the sheriff’s department said.

They are asking anyone with information about the woman’s identity to contact the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coronor Division at (909) 378-2978 and reference case number 702507482. Callers wishing to remain anonymous can contact We-Tip at (800) 78-CRIME (27463) or go to wetip.com.

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Hayley Smith

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November 29, 2025
Officer shoots suspect at a liquor store in San Bernardino

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An investigation is underway Friday following an officer-involved shooting in San Bernardino.

The shooting occurred at a liquor store in the 300 block of Northpark Boulevard, according to the San Bernardino Police Department.

The suspect was transported to a hospital in unknown condition.

Details on what led up to the shooting are unclear.

This is a developing story, check back for details.

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Missael Soto

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November 28, 2025
Slain sheriff’s deputy embraced life, realized dream of patrolling Rancho Cucamonga
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Sobs. Deep breaths. Tears.

Mourners exhibiting their depth of feeling struggled at times to pay tribute during the funeral service on Tuesday, Nov. 18, for San Bernardino County sheriff’s Deputy Andrew Nunez, who was slain as he arrived at a home in Rancho Cucamonga on Oct. 27 in an attempt to rescue a woman who authorities say was being forced into a car at gunpoint by her ex-husband.

Nunez, 28, had been a deputy for six years when a man identified as Angelo Jose Saldivar hid behind a building and fired a single shot when Nunez got out of his patrol car on Hollyhock Drive. Saldivar fled on a motorcycle and was arrested after a deputy used his car to knock over Saldivar’s bike as it sped away on the 210 Freeway in Upland. Saldivar has pleaded not guilty to murder, attempted kidnapping and other charges.

“There was a victim in distress, and Andrew got to her as soon as possible,” sheriff’s Capt. Mike Smith, who was Nunez’s commander at the Rancho Cucamonga station, said at the Toyota Arena in Ontario. “He ran toward danger to protect a victim he did not know. His life was taken by the senseless act of a coward.”

Nunez is survived by his wife, 2-year-old daughter and an unborn daughter.

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A San Bernardino County sheriff’s Honor Guard fold the flag a top slain Deputy Andrew Nunez’s casket during funeral services at Toyota Arena in Ontario on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025. Nunez was shot to death in the line of duty while responding to a domestic violence call in Rancho Cucamonga on Oct. 27. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

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The stage was adorned with photographs and flowers. An honor guard stood watch beside the casket draped with an American flag.

Nunez’s mother, Yolanda, described her son as having strong convictions, fearless, impulsive, “stubborn at times, yes … ready to embrace life with both hands. He always looked out for me, that I was loved, that I was OK.”

A supporter rubbed Nunez’s arm as she spoke through her tears.

“He loved praying. He loved playing golf …

“I can’t … Nunez said, unable to continue.

The supporter took over Nunez’s eulogy.

“I will forever carry the honor of having loved him and the even bigger honor of having been loved by him,” she said.

Nunez’s wife, Roxana, wore dark glasses as she spoke inside the 11,000-seat arena that hosted law enforcement officers from Southern California and beyond.

“He was an incredible father and loving partner,” she said. “He was ambitious and fearless, always pushing himself. But he had the softest heart when it came to our family.”

She inhaled deeply.

“He was proud to stand beside all of you,” Nunez’s wife said. “He made things lighter, he made things better. And if he were here now, he’d be laughing at us for crying. … I love you, baby.”

Andrew Nunez grew up without a strong father figure in his life, Roxana Nunez said, so as the eldest child in the family, he pushed his four siblings to “never give up and be strong. As he got older, he learned to step back a bit, but he never truly left. He was always there on the sideline, ready to help.”

When it came to sports, Nunez was rarely on the sideline. He played football, basketball and soccer, and he was a member of the football team at Los Osos High in Rancho Cucamonga, Deputy Chief Ernie Perez said. And Nunez was a fan of the Lakers and Dodgers.

“Especially the Dodgers,” Perez said.

Nunez dreamed early on of becoming a sheriff’s deputy and patrolling Rancho Cucamonga, where he attended church at the time of his death. He told anybody who’d listen, including co-workers at a cellular company.

“Andrew’s friend told me he talked too much to customers and he talked himself right out of sales,” Capt. Smith said, adding that Nunez made sure to tell his bosses when he exceeded sales goals.

Nunez graduated from the sheriff’s academy in September 2019 and worked in the jails and in transportation before getting the call to realize his dream by reporting to the Rancho Cucamonga station for patrol duty almost three years ago. Most recently, he was assigned to the theft detail at Victoria Gardens, where he kept his partners entertained with his witticisms and good-natured sarcasm, Smith said.

Nunez was training harder and eating healthier foods as he sought a coveted position on the SWAT team.

“I have no doubt you were going to be a member of the SWAT team,” Smith said.

Sheriff Shannon Dicus remembered Nunez as “a servant, a guardian and a protector.”

“To Andrew, it didn’t matter that they were strangers. What mattered was that it was his duty as a peace officer and most of all, it was his duty to his lord and savior, Jesus Christ. He established a legacy of service that will echo far beyond this moment in the hearts of everyone who had the privilege of knowing him.”

A colleague and friend, Sgt. David Rayenhartz, said he would counsel Nunez on how to improve his work, and he did. Rayenhartz exhorted Nunez to exceed the sergeant’s accomplishments and said Nunez did, as a father, husband and cop.

Rayenhartz paused a few times to compose himself.

“He was simply Andrew … he was like a son,” Rayenhartz said.

Toward the end of the two-hour ceremony, a video showed images of Nunez with family and friends at various stages of his life. It concluded with his eldest daughter pulling a photo of her father, in his deputy’s uniform, off a table. She placed it on the floor and kissed it.

“Daddy!” she exclaimed.

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Law enforcement and guests arrive for the funeral of slain San Bernardino County sheriff’s Deputy Andrew Nunez prior to funeral services at Toyota Arena in Ontario on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025. Nunez was shot to death in the line of duty while responding to a domestic violence call in Rancho Cucamonga on Oct. 27. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

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Guitars flutter, an accordion wheezes and a singer unwinds the triumphant tale of Fernando Ochoa Jauregui, a Modesto-area builder of food trucks and trailers.

“He still parties just because he feels like it,” the lyrics go. “But what he enjoys the most is partying with a banda at festivals in his town with a beautiful lady by his side.”

In a video accompanying the Spanish-language corrido, images flash of Ochoa beaming in front of shiny cars and atop jet skis. In some, he wears hats with the logo of his company: 8A Food Trucks. It ends with footage of stacks of cash and a money-counting machine.

The narrative ballad, titled “El del 8A” on YouTube, gives the impression that Ochoa is a kingpin at the helm of a burgeoning empire — one who “gives thanks to his father for making him a good kid.”

But unhappy 8A Food Trucks customers across California — from Sacramento to Salinas and San Bernardino — tell their own stories. They describe toiling as cooks, custodians and construction workers, saving for years to get a chance at starting their own business, only to have their dreams dashed. In a rough and tumble industry, largely secluded in poor, immigrant neighborhoods and farming communities, they allege Ochoa stands out for his callousness.

In lawsuits and interviews, former clients accused Ochoa and his company of not delivering trucks or trailers they ordered and refusing to return their partial or full payments. Others alleged that they received vehicles so poorly built that they couldn’t be used. And some have accused Ochoa of taking back trailers they’d purchased from him.

All told, 15 alleged victims claimed more than $475,000 in losses, according to a Times analysis.

In an interview, Ochoa, 28, disputed several of the allegations and acknowledged some mistakes, chalking them up in part to his inexperience in business, which he said led to delays in completing projects for customers. “I’m trying to deal with this scandal so I can make my business better again — I had a real company,” he said. “I’m not a business expert. I just know how to build trucks.”

Ochoa has become a symbol in Spanish media of the perils that lurk in the mobile food industry. In a 2023 report on him, a Univision news anchor warned those entering the business to exercise extreme caution. The controversy comes at a fraught moment for vendors in Southern California. Several in the L.A. area were robbed by gunmen last summer in brazen attacks that highlight the risks of selling food on Southland streets.

Alejandro Gonzalez was in a dispute over payment for a trailer when an old Toyota Camry pulled up to the drive-through window of Mi Casita Purepecha, his San Bernardino restaurant, on Feb. 1.

“Are you Alejandro?” the front-seat passenger asked Gonzalez, who was standing at the window.

The restaurateur said he was — and the man pulled out a gun and pointed it at him.

In the confusion of the moment, Gonzalez said, he turned to help customers inside the Mexican restaurant and the Camry sped away. Gonzalez, 44, didn’t recognize the men. But he said he fears that they are connected to Ochoa. Asked about the incident, Ochoa said he did not send armed men to Mi Casita Purepecha.

Gonzalez and his wife, Paulina Quintal, had contacted 8A Food Trucks in early January about building them two trailers so they could start a mobile food business. Ochoa delivered a trailer to their home two weeks later. Gonzalez said that he and his wife paid for it in full, and gave the builder a check for the down payment on a second one.

San Bernardino resident Alejandro Gonzalez said that this mobile food trailer, which he purchased from 8A Food Trucks, was stolen from his driveway in January.

(Alejandro Gonzalez)

Soon, however, men working for Ochoa appeared at Mi Casita Purepecha to dispute Gonzalez’s ownership of the trailer he’d bought days earlier, he said. Then, after the couple’s check for the second trailer didn’t clear, a third party passed along what Gonzalez said was a threatening voicemail from Ochoa.

On Jan. 21, Gonzalez said he returned from an errand to find his trailer had been stolen from his driveway. Seeking answers, he said he traveled to 8A Food Trucks’ headquarters in Ceres, Calif., but found the site deserted. The next day, Gonzalez said, the men with the gun visited him.

Gonzalez filed reports with the San Bernardino Police Department over the theft and the run-in at his restaurant. Regarding Ochoa, Gonzalez said, “I don’t know how he sleeps.”

Ochoa denied stealing the trailer from Gonzalez and Quintal’s home — “I would never do that,” he said — and alleged that they had not fully paid for it, saying that the check that bounced was meant to go toward the money they owed on it. Ochoa said he had sent two people to Mi Casita Purepecha to address those matters — and not to intimidate the couple.

“None of my people are armed,” he said. “We are businessmen; we dedicate ourselves to working and building trailers.”

Though the dollar amounts in most of the cases involving Ochoa are not large, for fledgling operators trying to break into the mobile food industry — many of them working-class immigrants — it’s enough to sidetrack their business dreams. And their predicaments highlight the vulnerability of California’s food industry workers, many of whom lack a financial safety net or the time and experience required to navigate the legal system. Some are undocumented and fear speaking to authorities.

“There were nights that we would cry, my husband and I,” said Adriana Nicanor, a San Joaquin resident. She and her husband filed a lawsuit against Ochoa and 8A Food Trucks last year that asserted he never delivered a trailer and claimed he refused to return their $20,000 deposit. They secured a default judgment, court records show, but have been unable to collect on it.

“It’s very frustrating,” Nicanor said. “My brother lent me that money. There were times we would struggle. Who asks for this?”

For many of Ochoa’s clients, making a down payment on a truck or trailer — both of which typically include kitchens — was an important first step in fulfilling a long-held entrepreneurial ambition. Some said that the alleged losses were especially painful because they came at the hands of one of their own: a Mexican immigrant who lived in the Central Valley and previously worked at an industrial shop before founding 8A Food Trucks in 2019.

He’s taking advantage of “the campesinos — the farmworkers,” said activist Alicia Espinoza, a Moreno Valley resident who has helped organize some of Ochoa’s accusers. “My dad, when he came to this country, he was a strawberry picker. It just hurts me that this guy could take advantage of people like him.”

Ochoa said he has many happy customers and has gone out of his way to help them achieve their aspirations, noting, for example, that he has sometimes accepted payment in installments. “Not many businesses do that,” he said. “You know, we’re not a bank.” As for the Nicanors, Ochoa denied that he failed to meet an agreed-upon deadline for delivery, and said he plans to pay them back.

Mi Casita Purepecha restaurant's drive-through area

Several of those making allegations against Ochoa reside in Stanislaus County, an agricultural hub whose biggest city is Modesto. Wendell Emerson, a deputy district attorney for the county, confirmed that his office is conducting “an active criminal investigation” of Ochoa. He declined to comment further.

After the incident at Mi Casita Purepecha, Gonzalez closed the restaurant and left San Bernardino, relocating his family — he and his wife have three children — to a place they feel safe.

“I don’t know how long it is going to be,” Gonzalez said. “I feel like I lost everything.”

Lawsuits reveal a pattern

Ochoa is an entrepreneur of the internet age.

Food industry workers who’ve done business with the Colima, Mexico, native said that they found him via social media, where his posts depict a professional at the helm of a prosperous company.

The Instagram account for 8A Food Trucks includes several images of gleaming vehicles, their stainless steel kitchens spotless under bright lights. The “8A” in the company’s name is a play on words: pronounced in Spanish, it sounds like “Ochoa.”

A recently divorced father of two young girls, Ochoa has positioned 8A as a brand beyond the world of food services: There are Instagram pages for a hat company with 8A in the name, and another for a jet-ski rental service. It’s all part of a slick image that Ochoa has cultivated online, where it’s easy to find his self-aggrandizing corridos and photographs of him posing in front of his black Chevrolet Corvette.

“Now they see me living well,” the lyrics of one song go, “driving around in a Corvette, buzzing.”

Ochoa’s flaunting of his success has infuriated customers with whom he’s tussled.

For Norma Estevez and her husband, Sebastian Delgado, entering the mobile food trade was a step toward realizing an important goal: owning a business they could pass onto their three children. But Estevez and Delgado, both Mexican American, believe they lost more money than any of Ochoa’s other alleged victims.

The Salinas couple contacted Ochoa in 2021 to build a pair of trailers, selecting him, Estevez said, because he was Latino. “He didn’t have many clients,” she said, “and you could tell he has this aspiration to succeed.”

Estevez needed the trailers for a big opportunity: She had signed a contract with a produce company in nearby Watsonville to feed 70 field workers for 10 months beginning in February 2022. The owner had predicated the deal on her securing a trailer and having proper permits.

Ochoa told her that each trailer would cost $41,000, and promised to complete construction by the end of January, according to Estevez, who showed The Times invoices that documented the deal.

She and her husband sent Ochoa $60,000 over the course of several months, and as the deadline approached, they scheduled a day to pick up the trailers from 8A Food Trucks’ shop, Estevez said. But Ochoa canceled on them, she said, explaining that “his mother had arrived from Mexico and that he needed to pick her up from the airport.” They rescheduled, but he again put them off.

By then, Estevez’s contract with the Watsonville company had begun, and she scrambled to honor it. She was forced to buy meals for the workers, spending about $37 per person a day for the next week and a half — an all-in cost of nearly $26,000. Eventually, she rented a kitchen for $800 a week, and did so until the contract concluded, turning only a small profit on the deal.

And without the trailers, Estevez wasn’t able to renew the contract. “I felt embarrassed … like we had lost a great opportunity,” she said.

Ochoa acknowledged that he didn’t meet the agreed-upon deadline — and that the situation was similar to that of other clients who didn’t receive their vehicles on time. But, he said, others were willing to wait. “Norma’s situation was that if she didn’t get the trailers by a certain date, then she wasn’t going to need them,” he said.

Estevez and Delgado filed a lawsuit against Ochoa for breach of contract and other claims in July 2022. Months later, the parties agreed to a settlement that called for Ochoa to pay Estevez and Delgado about $70,000, including attorney’s fees, according to court documents. Estevez said that Ochoa has only paid $30,000, leaving her deeply disillusioned.

“We were like him, we came to this country to better our lives,” she said. “He knew our dream and ambitions — we told him how hard we worked for it.”

Gonzalez, meanwhile, isn’t the only person who alleged that a trailer purchased from Ochoa was later taken back by him.

Shelly Lopez and her husband, Jesus Avalos, said they paid Ochoa $37,000, and after nine months of delays — and their appearance in a Univision 19 Sacramento segment to discuss them — the Sacramento couple received a trailer in January 2023.

A man attaches a mobile food trailer to a truck

After just a week, though, Ochoa told Lopez that he needed to take it back to his shop to make some adjustments, she said. A video that Lopez provided to The Times shows a man she identified as Ochoa connecting the trailer to the back of a pickup truck in February 2023.

“I didn’t want to let him take it,” Lopez said. “But my husband said, ‘It’s OK, he’ll make the repairs and bring it back to us.’”

It was the last time Lopez and Avalos saw the trailer.

“We had so many fights after that,” she said. “It would come up whenever we were driving and saw people running their businesses, selling food. I would blame him for it.”

Ochoa said that Lopez hadn’t paid for the trailer in full, and that she was making payments in installments. He said that he only retrieved the trailer after she told him it needed repairs. After seeing her negative public comments about him, Ochoa said that he decided to void the payment plan, and resolved to return her funds.

Lopez said she has not gotten the money back.

‘He’s been laughing at us’

In recent days, Ochoa has come under attack online by disgruntled customers — and his former mother-in-law.

Gisela Macias, 48, said that strangers began showing up at her Modesto home over the summer in search of Ochoa. They came, she said, to demand he pay them back for vehicles they’d purchased but never received. The visits were so frequent that she began recording interviews with some of the people to post on TikTok.

Ochoa said that the internet activism and local TV news stories have led to an exodus of clients, which has imperiled his ability to pay back customers like Estevez. He said that he can only make payments in $1,000 increments. “I know it’s not much,” he said, “but I have no business due to everything that’s being said about my company.”

He said he had to close 8A Food Trucks’ headquarters in Ceres because angry clients kept going there to confront him. But his braggadocio is still easy to find on the internet. A 2023 corrido about Ochoa titled “Por 8A Me Conocen” includes the boast that “business is steady and we’re never going to stop.”

“I fought hard and little by little grew the empire that I founded,” the singer trills.

It incenses Estevez. “He’s been laughing at us — the people who had dreams, who worked hard to save money to make those dreams a reality,” she said.

These days, the equipment that Estevez and her husband bought for their two trailers — ovens, cooking wares and more — is mothballed in their garage. It’s hard for her to enter the space without crying.

“That’s our dream right there, collecting dust,” she said.

Times researcher Scott Wilson and columnist Gustavo Arellano contributed to this report.

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Daniel Miller, Ruben Vives

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Median home sale price	$475,000
Average monthly rent	$1,761
Walk Score	45/100
Transit Score	31/100
Bike Score	44/100

Tag: San Bernardino

Investigators seek help identifying woman found dead on mountainside in San Bernardino

Officer shoots suspect at a liquor store in San Bernardino

Slain sheriff’s deputy embraced life, realized dream of patrolling Rancho Cucamonga

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